When President-elect Joe Biden is sworn in on January 20, the social network Twitter will create a @SecondGentleman account on Twitter, an account for Douglas Emhoff, the husband of Kamala Harris, vice president. The report will be a way to mark the historic election of the first female vice president ever.
During the administrations of Donald Trump and Barack Obama, the official @SecondLady Twitter accounts belonged to Karen Pence, wife of Vice President Mike Pence, and Jill Biden, wife of then Vice President Joe Biden, respectively.
Next Wednesday, the @SecondLady account will officially switch to @SecondGentleman; and this is just one of the various switches Twitter will make to transfer the White House’s top social media accounts from the Trump administration to the Biden administration.
Olivier Douliery / AFP
“As we did in 2017, Twitter is actively working with the U.S. government to support the archiving and transition of Twitter accounts by administrations,” Twitter wrote in a January 14 blog post.
The other institutional Twitter accounts of the White House that are transferred under the control of the Biden administration include the White House (@WhiteHouse), President (@POTUS), Vice President (@VP), First Lady (@FLOTUS) and the White House Press Secretary (@PressSec).
Before Twitter gives the handles and their reports to Biden’s team, Twitter will first transfer the institutional accounts of the current administration to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). The tweets and history of each account will remain publicly available with their account usernames to reflect their archive status.
For example, the current @POTUS account of the Trump administration will be publicly filed as @ POTUS45.
In addition, the Twitter accounts currently used by Biden’s top officials will be transferred to their official institutional accounts.
The account of the elected president’s team, @ Transition46, for example, is @ WhiteHouse; Joe Biden’s account @PresElectBiden becomes @POTUS; Harris’s political report @SenKamalaHarris will become @VP; Jill Biden’s current account @FLOTUSBiden will become @FLOTUS, as in First Lady of the United States; and president-elected press secretary Jen Psaki, who currently uses @PressSecPsaki, becomes @PressSec.
Twitter users who have previously followed the White House’s institutional Twitter accounts or who are currently following the Biden administration’s current accounts will receive in-app alerts that enable them to follow the new administration’s accounts.
The news about Twitter’s transition process follows an ongoing dispute between the president-elect and the microblogging platform over the recovery of the number of followers of each institutional account.
When Trump took office in 2017, he was allowed to take over the @POTUS account with his 12 million followers gathered during the Obama era. Now that it’s Biden’s turn to take it over, Twitter has said it will set the number of followers to zero instead of Biden having the current 60 million followers of the account.
“[Twitter is] “President Trump’s first days of government favored ours,” Rob Flaherty, the soon-to-be director of digital strategy at the Biden White House, told Bloomberg News. They gave us less than they gave to Donald Trump, and that’s a failure. “
He added: “There is value in communicating with an audience that does not agree with us.” Instead, the @POTUS account can easily get @ PresElectBiden’s 213,700 current followers.
Joe Biden’s personal Twitter account @JoeBiden has more than 23.9 million followers.